Carve a path, child.
Carve a path around
the bushes, place the stones
that others leave behind in
patterns you’ll remember for
the music they create when
rain and melted snow from
crag and blustered
mountain fall.

Here are tools.
They are used but
good ones nonetheless:
compass, triangle—squares,
they’ll show up soon enough
with not necessarily right angles—
a length of twine for getting and
forgetting rules of symmetry, a
sieve to shake the background
noises to the back where they
belong. What’s left inside the
netted steel is yours to toss
or wear around your neck.

You ask about the seeds.
I’ve none to give. I’m forested,
my limbs to cabinets for guns
and vanities are marked,
but you, your pockets
and the space behind
your ears—that place they
always check and scrub
and scold you for—are
full of unconceived, the
seeds that nobody but
you can see. D. S.

Don’t Stop.
It’s a sign I made
when I was young
and still connecting
dots. I never found a
place to hang or post it
in my garden, though I’ve
known the pleasure once
or twice of hearing it.
You’ll hear it too.

And now I see
you’d like to know
does secret mean
that should you fall
asleep one night inside
your garden, you might
wake one day to find
the world outside has
moved away and left
you with your bottle
caps and robin eggs
and fine clear paths?

This I cannot answer.
Only you decide what
secret means; the world
can only turn, it has nowhere
to go but round and round
and doesn’t care.

Your garden, though,
has heights and depths
and passages, descents
and entryways to places
built for two or three or
fifty-three and thousands
more you may adore—
you made a door, I’ll bet
you didn’t notice, look,
it’s here, as sturdy as a
tree. With every choice for
happiness, you made it
strong, it floats like cork
and locked is safer than
the mint of Knox. Who holds
the key? No one. It’s here
inside this vanity that’s
marked:

I’m me
I am forever me
and that’s enough!

And now it’s time
for me to let you be.
Your garden’s built and
growing, and I spy a pair
of irises fast rafting down
the winter melt affixed on
you. Enjoy, my sweet
young architect, adieu!

Today, after a series of strange events, I pulled from my shelves a volume of poetry by Manuel Acuña, (1849-1873) a Mexican poet who died at the age of twenty-four by his own hand. I hadn’t opened the book since 1998 when I’d tried, unsuccessfully, to translate some of his beautiful work. But I had penciled a few lines inside the front cover:

Del libro de la vida / la que escribimos hoy es la última hoja.
From the book of life / what we write today is the last page.

Since writing is how I spend my days, the lines from “Resignación” felt especially poignant. I thought I’d try my hand at translating the rest of the poem, which Acuña wrote in 1872, a year before his death. I hope you will enjoy the optimism and energy of his words as much as I did. Any mistakes in translation are definitely mine! You will find the original Spanish after the translation.

Resignation

Without tears, without complaints,
without farewells, without a sob!
We carried on until the last…fortune
brought us here with the same objective,
we both came to bury the soul
beneath the tomb of scepticism.

Without tears…tears have no power
to bring a cadaver back to life;
our flowers fall and they turn
but at least in the turning, they leave
us with dry sight and a firm conscience.

Now you see it! for your soul and mine
spaces and the world are deserts…
we have concluded both,
covered with sadness and affliction,
we’re not at the end, we’re just two corpses
in search of the shroud of forgetting.

Children and dreamers when we
barely left the cradle,
pain, still alien to our lives
slipping along sweet and serene
like a swan’s wing in a lagoon;
when the dawn of the first caress
hasn’t yet peeked beneath the veil
that the virginal ignorance of the child
extends between his eyelids and the sky
your soul like mine,
in its clock advancing the hour
and in their darknesses lighting the day,
they saw a panorama that opened
beneath a kiss and at that dawn’s light;
and feeling, upon seeing that countryside
the wings of a supreme force,
we opened them early, and early
they brought us to the end of the voyage.

We gave to earth
the tints of love, and of the rose;
to our garden nests and songs
to our heaven birds and stars;
we used up the flowers on the road
to fashion from them
a crown for the angel of destiny…
and today in the midst of sad discord
of such an agonized or dead flower
one lifts only the pale and deserted
bloom that is poisoned by memory.

From the book of life
what we write today is the last page…
Let’s close it at once
and in the sepulchre of lost faith
we will also bury our anguish.

And since heaven now concedes that
these evils are our last
so the soul can prepare to rest,
although the final tear cost us
we saw the task through to the end.
And afterward, when the angel of forgetting
has delivered these ashes
that guard the painful memory
of so many illusions smashed to bits
and of so much vanished pleasure,
we’ll leave these spaces and return
to the tranquil life of earth,
now that the night of early pain
advances toward and encloses us
in the sweet horizons of tomorrow.

Let’s leave these spaces or if you
want to, we can try out our breath,
a new journey to that blessed region
whose only memory resuscitates
the cadaver of the soul, upon feeling.
Let’s throw ourselves off this world then,
where everything is shadow and void,
we’ll make a moon from memory
if the sun of our love has grown cold;
we’ll fly if you like,
to the depths of those magic regions
and pretending hopes and illusions
we’ll smash the tomb and rising
on our bold and powerful flight,
we will form a heaven between shadows
and we will be the owners of that heaven.

Untapped genius of the world
is breathing through my open
window stanzas of mock orange
and paragraphs of grass freshly
mown; a novelistic memory strains
through spaces in the screen
to land reconstituted, granular
like salt across the floor that’s
clean but not too much, and
there is more—the belly laughs
of children freed from school,
gotta call my Dad, I’ll race ya!
spokes of bike wheels whiffling
up a breeze, these lungs of life
are clear and all that might
appear to contradict, to turn
the world against itself
is mockery.

I met you on the streets of Oaxaca
at night, staggering home from a party
or fight, you were singing rancheros
with all of your might, and I feared
my chihuahua would die of sheer—

Frightened you were, my love, that
I agree, I affirm uncontestedly, but we
met on a boat in Tehuantepec. You
admired my muscles, the curve
of my peck—

No, no, no! A lady of virtue that
I surely am would never engage
in ogling a man, though as I recall
I was waving a fan in the heat
of the boat and your hand—

Two threes and a king
wouldn’t buy me a taco, but
you had this thing that you did
with your eyes, and my courage
she rose, and a thought came to
life in the crook of my thighs…

Go on, I’m listening.

…and I looked at the guys
who were looking at you—

And I knew when you won
with the crappiest hand I had
found me the one, a magical man
who could hold up his own in the
face of my wit on the boat,
the canal of Tehuantepec—

No, no, no! They never did
build the canal, I was wrong.
We met in Oaxaca, the streets
were quite empty, and your little
hua-hua despised my guitarra,
but I kept on singing ‘cause you
gave me power, and now we are—

Masterful, magic and wit, forever
inseparable, though I submit we
should quit this partimen and
find a cantina. It’s your turn to pay.

~~~

Walking the streets of Oaxaca
at night is not recommended,
but if you should find yourself
craving tamales, garnachas,
a nice chimichanga with no
other signs of a Mexican
hunger, then do check your
pockets and heart—not for
money, but things you believe
in. If love is not there or you’ve
squashed it with reason, look
around in the dark, in the shadows
you’ll find a handsome señor and
his foxy señora, their yappy
chihuahua who hates the
laments of ranchero guitarra.

They’ve come not to harm you
but show you a way to chase
the unwanted diablitos away
like this, sing with me…

Last night you flowed the taste of caramel through my waking dreams, an amber warmth your words attuned electric pin pricks at the outermost the tips of all I slowly plant along the roads in memory of our clustered peregrinos.

Golden light is hard to see when camouflaging plum shades and sienna fill the crevices of under-watered lives, and when I try too hard to look at you the stripes of dark and light like jailbirds scar my eyes, and no one warned me hornets sleep in petalled sheets of rose— so much for smelling you!

New music to my ears of late, compels, and touching well requires more than garbled tongue and fingertips.

For now, it is enough that certain gates be closed the sumac knows which flavours to admit & hawk she loves the taste of fresh caught prey and gravity.

The universal echo of the
sounding system that is
shaman is my final word
on tricks of elocution meant
to summon some and some
to send away until
the sunset revolutions
has her way with
certain beaux jeunes hommes
who answer
to the rune songs
that precede
cerebral paucities
opinions of complexities
the rattle drum
the rattle snake
uproot the tattle
that forsakes
and likes to think
anticipates
but cannot reach
behind itself
and cannot read
the Ogham of
the mighty and forbidding
wizard’s tree until
it’s burned the inner
bark of self-impotent
self-important, self
importing culture-vulturosity
not virtuous but vulturous
and vulgar in its opulence,
its oculence, an ocu-lens
innocuous, a knock
a knock, a knock
a knock, a knock…

~~~

In recent months, I’ve posted a few examples at Oceantics of rune-singing, the ancient incantation or song-prayers, familiar to my Finnish ancestors in pre-Christian times. I haven’t said much about the posts, preferring to leave the experience to readers. However, because of our tendency and desire to interpret, thereby to increase enjoyment, I thought I’d say a few words about the craft.

Rune-singing is primarily a vibrational language that relies on a combination of sound, word play and intentionality of the shaman. Because many of us hear incantation in languages we don’t speak, we assume (seldom a good idea) that the chants are nonsensical. If you’ve had the pleasure of reading Kalevala in Finnish or in a solid translation, you’ll know that nothing could be further from the truth. The entire saga is a rune-song, an epic, pure story, layered and riddled with meanings within meaning.

When the shaman, male or female, embarks upon a rune song, she begins with intentionality. She brings it as an offering to whatever level of the vibrational (sound-based) universe she’s capable of reaching. The more skilled the shaman, the more quickly he can reach the symbiosis, sacred marriage, of physical-nonphysical, and the rattlesnake of sound comes to life.

In ancient times, which were not pre-literate but literate of a different nature, the rune-song was a one-off event, something like flamenco. You must learn the rhythms, but don’t waste your time trying to repeat what you’ve just heard—or worse, analyze it. She’s gone: allow and enjoy the transformation if you had one. If not, there will always be another.

The best way to enjoy a written rune-song is to read it aloud. Let your blood and bones feel the syllabic, multi-layered, agglutinative word play. Note, too, where the rhythms make you stumble. They’re there deliberately, not to trip you in a “haha, made you fall!” way but to knock the rational mind into different layers of thinking. Where you end up at the end of the rune-song may be somewhere pleasurable, or not. The good news is, you can read it again and be uplifted, read it again and be uplifted more…

A word about the image: I found this glorious picture of Louhi, hag of the North, at http://www.kalevalataidettakouluille.ateneum.fi. She is the “antagonista” of the Kalevala epic, shamaness of the highest degree. Don’t be fooled by her appearance. Louhi was (she is) a master of the rattle, and a good witch to have on your side when composing rune-songs.

Unplucked, the highest fruit must fall, the Book of Changes says of you and me, this day of twenty-three, disintegrating hook by crook and other piracies that slay your notions of lukewarm egalité.All blood is royal blue until it’s spilled, all secrets that once shocked us fade to gray. The fleurs de lis you wore upon your cloak now decorate the oxen’s humble yoke.

II

Thunder, it is said, in winter months hides deep in mountain passes, where no one can penetrate; a solitary force bides she, till heated whispers of lightning’s plan arouses her. She creeps across the land sharp-focused, rumbling through the fertile minds that have no fear of mysteries, she’ll dam the rest, their wayward tongues she’ll scorch & bind and leave you chasing shadows till you’re blind.

III

The purple ash outside my house stands tall. Descendant of Armada’s fleet, he knows the names and faces of the ones who call, regardless of the hour, and he throws the stubborn profligate as food to crows. Our moments of past symmetry may shine— don’t know—but polished copper pots don’t grow a garden or a book, so leave what’s mine for me to blend until it turns to wine.

Septrois is my latest poetry form, borrowing the spirit of medieval French verse as it developed in the Aquitaine. Septrois is a neologue that blends sept (seven) with trois (three), referring to the original 7-line poem and three new lines added to each. Conjoined, the two numbers create a word play, sept rois, that translates as “seven kings”.

I’ll say more about the rhyme scheme and rules after you’ve had a chance to enjoy the 28-line septrois. First, though, here are the originating seven lines, the final stanza from “The Chambered Nautilus” by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894).

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
embracing the unknown as playful sport or
means to ever curious and hopeful be
of constant love, sweet whirling with delight.

~~~

How to construct Septrois, Seven Kings:
Begin with an original 7-line borrowed stanza or poem, which we’ll call “the genesis”. From each line or “day of creation”, write three new lines, “kings”, that enhance or converse with the genesis. From this ratio of 1:3 or 7:21, a 28-line poetic dialogue is created.

The rhyme scheme of the genesis doesn’t matter. Only the 3-line kings follow the sequence. Their lines must also support the theme and link the stanzas logically, so you’ve created a unified or expanded poem with the joining of sept and trois.

At the age of fifteen, on the path of St. James,
she sets out in search of lovers she has lost
and the children she mourns who have no names
but she has no money & she doesn’t know the cost.

In a California mission where firs are tipped with frost
an acolyte remembers playing cruel parlour games
and abandoning a woman in a place called Vladivost…
at the age of fifteen, on the path of St. James.

The mother of the searching girl repudiates her claims
that we have all loved here before. She’s crossed
affection off her list, and though the girl’s disdained
she sets out in search of lovers she has lost.

The man turned priest, his dreams are tempest-tossed;
to Compostela he is sent, in hopes his soul reclaims
a calling, there she finds him weeping near a cross
and the children she mourns who have no names

surround him in the company of Peter, John and James.
Transfigured, he looks around at robes embossed
and sees her midst the faces innocent of shame,
but she has no money & she doesn’t know the cost—

nor he, of recovering & managing the lover he has lost.
They’ve grown too much to wear their former chains,
and so the saints with sweet affection blow exhaust
from both their hearts, restoring youth that reigns
at the age of fifteen.

In this beautiful week leading to Midsummer’s Eve, I thought I would share my first double sestina that I completed on the Summer Solstice of 2011. I was already hooked on the sestina form as a means of twirling the brain and dancing with a theme, and I’d read warnings on poetry sites not to attempt the daunting double version. I am here to tell you, they are FUN! “Manifestina” also came about by a dare from a poet friend, D. Russel Micnheimer, who suggested we each contribute six of the twelve end words, write our own double sestinas, and see what comes out. “Manifestina” took two weeks to write, and it was pure joy.

A Note on the Image: The rag rugs and pelts are in the attic of a family homestead in northern Finland. Some of the rugs probably go back 100 years, and that’s a real working spinning wheel. I’m delighted to share the attic’s treasures with you here, dear reader.

Manifestina: A Double Sestina in Four Parts

I

Until my inheritance arrived in a pine crate marked Fragile, I knew nothing of runes.
My godmother is dead. Her portrait hangs over there near the coleus. Her calling,
people thought, was wife of a pastor, obedient, still; velvet-lined offering
plates providing their sustenance on this vast rocky continent many moons
ago. Evenings, she spun near the grandly displayed leather-bound Bible, a cunning
parlour arrangement of handwoven rag rugs, upright chairs, designed for brevity,
for Pastori, away from the pulpit, was a man of few reaches, his nourishment
dependent on her lingonberry kropsut and silence, desponding for his fjords.
They met, so I’m told, at a picnic one Sunday near the Tapiola waterfall:
fiery young girl who loved to dance, Lutheran seminarian who didn’t, sounding
nonetheless to her eyes and ears like a hero of Kaleva, his Nordic levity
outshining the broody pall of her brothers. He was also very good at listening.

Now disassembled in front of the TV lies her spinning wheel. I’m listening
sort of to my lover on his smart phone bemoaning the inscrutable Dow Jones runes
that ruined his retirement and counting the months I have endured his waterfall
when, suddenly, the twelve-spoked wheel jerks in the box, an anti-physics levity
that makes me drop the phone and when I pick it up I hear her voice, “He moons
while you’re of solar ilk. Outshine!”—the hell? She speaks then of nourishment,
daily bread, though I’m too freaked to catch it. Yes, I have heard of ghosts calling
but the line is now dead, and then up comes a commercial for a seven-day Fjords
Cruise on a Norwegian liner with a land option add-on and a midsummer offering
of mystery and magic, which I’ve just experienced, though it’s already sounding
trite: a mini-tremor, trick of the eye. Still, I have unused holidays so with the brevity
of Internet, I book a solo cruise and hang the wheel to cover a stain: cunning.

II

Though I lie in pieces—sticks, a bag of bolts—my design remains cunning
though my spin has fallen still, hanging by a hook, I am still listening
to the whirr of incantations, rhythmic hand and foot songs, spinners’ brevity
drowned in complexities of this solar-maddened world, cooling moons
cast aside, their tide pulls forgotten, beams outshone, lunar nourishment
centrifugally emptied by empty spinning minds. I am of ash, mapped in runes;
simple etchings blessed have led me to this new restless owner, calling
out with the oscillating voice of the firmament, great world tree, offering
succor and sanction, sanctuary, sanity, for the sole purpose of sounding
humanity’s depths to the very toes of Helvetti, through rainbow and waterfall
rising from taproot to trunk to outspreading branches, leaving with levity
light’s upward push, right angled to the somber jagged thrust of fjords.

Over-deepened, semi-enclosed marine basins, the composition of fjords,
drones our doctoral tour guide, weathery and blue-eyed, of cunning
Viking stock, employed to enhance the ecotourists’ nourishment;
sedimentary sequences, glacial, deglacial, I resist the brevity
he assigns to beauty and aeonic movement, carved by moons
much wiser than the icon we conquered in sixty-nine. No longer listening,
I laugh midst the salt spray at a great skua’s cackle, magnificent sounding
of bird and sea when the land catches me behind the knees, calling,
an abysmal howl—human, inhuman, I cannot tell who is offering
this wilder maiden-bearing spin. Is such, I wonder, the nature of levity?

Upright my two maidens who support the construct of flyer and bobbin, runes
carved upon their limbs with a conjurer’s blade, they sing of waterfall
a thrumming nether built of wood gods, sprites and chortling waterfall
deities who in tandem reckless force rouse forests, fens and fjords
of the inner realm, incanting eight-fold trochaics of phonic brevity
that clack and whir through the flaxen arts, hear me sounding
feel me bounding, treadle-footed, wheel resounding—rhythmic runes
of an ancient race deglaciating, frozen through the ages, blood calling
out to minds gone porous and brittle, to seek infernal nourishment.
Revive the bones you cast, then cast aside. A gathering of new moons
awaits you, woman, eastward in a glade of birch and poplar, offering
truths of schist and calcite to obviate the old. But is she listening?

Seasick, I heave and wonder where and when I lost my cunning,
this off-center wheel, an elliptic wobble, was once fueled by levity
and is now grave, slick and sickened with false lubricants. Levity,
I remain persuaded, is no less a natural law than gravity. Water fall
water rise, fountaining. Even the roughest seas evaporate. This brevity
of vision, a toxicant, with each passing day is sounding
less and less like me. Emptied, I chart the bronze-edged moon’s
phases on the map above my birth, a pregnant gibbous calling
from an age that shunned the notion of lack of nourishment;
broadsided, my cosmetic bag spills across the floor: new runes.

At the edge of Tapiola’s waterfall, Kerttu braids her hair, listening;
tall and strong-boned, she dreams of majesty, of cool rugged fjords
and to join the west-sailing exodus. Well-crafted spinner, cunning,
she collects stones in defiance, builds secret cairns in offering
to all that heaves and grieves beneath her feet, exiled, offering
ignorance, refusing any yarns, spun or dyed, that offend her levity.
She entrances a Norwegian and drinks from his sexual nourishment,
though he turns out a shallow pool, his soul fast bound, his fjords
over-fished. To the scree of his holy scrip, she stops listening
and buries on the eve of their sailing a trace of girl-soul in the runes
of her homeland in hopes of reaching a consequent feminine, calling
across time, particulate, tumbled ashore by a truer god-sounding.

The postal bus drops me off at the village of my forebears, a cunning
pleroma of farms and birch groves, church and graveyard; the brevity
of commerce is restful to the eyes. Outside my one-room cabin, a waterfall
framed between shimmering aspens is stenciled through cut-out moons
silvering upon the screen door. At these latitudes, approaching solstice, the moon’s
lost her midnight prominence. I walk the forested paths of my godmother, offering
thanks, well-lit, for the respite from greed and bank towers. Beyond the waterfall
I find the bridge she used to talk about, laughing with unashamed brevity
where she kissed boys, braided grass circlets and sang loihturunot, old cunning,
poem-songs that spin new worlds into being; all this she remembered, sounding—

We gather in the Old Way, male Fennic carvers and chanters of runes
filaments of affection have conjured us; wide-open thought fields of nourishment
have summoned Ilkka, poet-singer of fame, and the Blind One, who’s listening
with the soles of his feet. Bonfires crackling, forearms we link in fraternal levity
to rebirth the heroes of Kaleva through pole star merge of Finn and fjords:
Ilmatar of air and light, seize her by the hand, we’re calling
Thor of fearsome thunder might, fuse her to the land, we’re calling
forth and back we rhyme the sequence, moons
in elemental frequence. Cast upon her now the cunning
spin the golden threads, the sunning, runes
we rock of blood and bone, waken Väinämöinen’s offering
turns he through us, burns he through us, wizard king of lake and fjords.

III

—as if it were yesterday. From across the bridge, a man approaches. Nourishment
I’ve brought, apples, bread and cheese, enough to share. Though he’s sounding
no footfall when his boot heels meet wood, I feel only calm—some waterfall
lunacy, no doubt. Flaxen hair to shoulders, he is tall and lightly bearded. Levity
from deep inside my belly shoots heartward. Welcome to ammo, he says. Listening
not so well, I say, what? Mmm, gjetost. He reaches out, smiling, man of brevity.

I hand him a wedge of goat cheese. Who are you, I ask, no stranger myself to brevity.
He sits on a fallen log and eats, regarding me in the way that men do, thus calling
to mind my godmother’s encounter eighty years ago at this very waterfall.
You’re not Norwegian and fond of kropsut, are you? I proffer him an apple offering.

Of Nordic race iambic seed, he says, of vanquished realms and distant fjords
created. Ammo, carried north by ancient Ugric tribes, is written in the runes
of your wheel that spins, meaning time of no time, agglutinating nourishment
to all that is and ever be. I am ennu pappi, oracle priest, the man of cunning
who tutored Kerttu in a spiral of this very solstice. His lyric speech sounding
like blue-green seas of juniper, I wonder whether o-priests are celibate. Moons
ago, he says, quatrinities spun freely in eternal ascension, keeping the levity
of earth and man in balance, dimensional monarchies, ever charged and listening
chopping blandishments and follies at their root. He pauses. Are you listening?
Me? What the heck are you going on about? I crunch into an apple: brevity.

IV

You are a pulse star blinking on and off. You are expanding fjords
upon a horizontal field, seeded and terrained by tides of thought-moons,
invaded, sadly, by false kings, ordinal descending integers, who demand offering
to a belief in continuity—not the ever-after, for happily, mind, is a cunning
truth—but the never-changing and its rank gravitational pull. This waterfall
brought on the Great Deluge that drowned humanity. I and others did a sounding:
all were dead, save Utnapishtim, who heeded, his three sons and Nature. Calling
upon Hel, fierce goddess of the lower realm, we, a delegation of nine, pleaded runes
scrip of wood and stone to reseed the flooded and now fertile banks of levity.
From her barge on rivers of magma, Hel seethed: I am the essence of nourishment, sending up continuous terra potentia to all. Yet all I see is malnourishment.

Here, he paused, silver eyes glistening, and I took his hand for I had been listening.
I picked up the thread. She asked us what we would give in exchange—her brevity
shot fields of ice across the earth. Panicked, I broke through the ranks, offering
whatever—we have means of paying! She looked at me and laughed, a waterfall
of lava. You, mortal, of water and clay? You are my creation, a spring surge of levity,
dust of my feet. No. I shook my head. I am your precreation, gifted with cunning.
Womb in exile, I have watched you spin the horizontal field, mapping out fjords
and firmaments. I can be your surety. Plant in me the seeds of remembering. Moons
will pass and when the world floods again to the point of deluge, I’ll heed the calling.
I will cast off the knots of forgetting, false banishment, to spin a new field, sounding
true depths of verse and converse, mother-of-all, your sacred loving art of runes.

Envoi

So now I am at home listening, and life, sweet life, is sounding
new, like it never was before. Fjords reach out boldly, majestic waterfall
cascades; the nourishment of joy spins out my hours. Fun-loving moons
pull me here and there, offering temptations; I appreciate their brevity.
No strings, only this moment calling the shots. Everywhere, I see runes
guiding me with levity, toward your smile ever-bright and cunning.